Lunch in Costa Rica

The increased availability of digital records on where organisms hangout (or occur) has been facilitated by
Darwin Core, a community standard for
exchanging biodiversity information. TDWG (pronounced tahd-wick), the association that helped nurture this standards
into maturity, held this year's annual meeting in
Costa Rica. While the primary focus of Darwin Core is on species occurrence, an extension mechanism is provided to
help capture other kinds of aspects of biodiversity data. While some methods exist to help describe
species interactions in DwC (e.g. associatedTaxa,
associatedOccurrences), various projects use "unofficial" extensions to
express granular species interaction data. GloBI makes an effort to support all of the methods in the hope that, over time,
we'll continue to discuss and collaborate on ways to improve ways to share interaction data.

A long time GloBI contributor, Katja Schulz, presented a poster on a pragmatic approach to integrating species
interaction data at the conference. Rather than relying on a single data exchange format, GloBI will take any
existing (semi-)structured digital format to make existing datasets easier to access. With this approach, the burden
of standardization of existing datasets is reduced. In addition, a continuous integration approach is taken: the
datasets are continuously refreshed and linked against taxonomies, ontologies and other biodiversity data
services.

Also, she, and some of her colleagues, joined for an in-promptu lunch to talk about species interaction data. I hope
that the outcome of this lunch will contribute to the ongoing development of ways to easily exchange evidence records on
how organisms rely on each other.